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Why Politicizing Open Source is a Terrible Idea

posted by chromas on Wednesday September 12 2018, @03:41PM   Printer-friendly
from the No-sir,-I-don't-like-it dept.

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard

In our increasingly politicized world, it has become popular to chant "all software is political." Software builds the systems that free or constrain us, the thinking goes, and so we should withhold it from bad people. This is the thinking that has led Microsoft employees and others to decry contracts tech companies have with ICE (US Department of Homeland Security Immigration and Customs Enforcement), insisting that their software only be sold to people they like.

[...] Over the years we as an open source community have experimented with all sorts of stupid ideas, like efforts to block anyone from using code for commercial purposes unless they pay. Each time, we've realized that as good a goal as it is for developers to get paid, for example, the destruction caused by closing off the code to uses we don't like ends up ruining the foundations upon which open source rests.

This is dramatically more important, however, when it comes to attempts to politicize open source software.

As developer Chris Cordle stated, "Nobody wins" and the "whole idea [undergirding open source] dies" ... "if an author arbitrarily picks and chooses who can and can't use it based on whoever Twittersphere is mad at this week." It doesn't matter if there is tremendous cause for that anger. Open source dies when it becomes politicized.

Source: https://www.techrepublic.com/article/why-politicizing-open-source-is-a-terrible-idea/

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by jmorris on Wednesday September 12 2018, @04:37PM (1 child)

    by jmorris (4844) on Wednesday September 12 2018, @04:37PM (#733693)

    Nope, none of the projects operating under BSD derived licenses would accept encumbered code like that. Hell, most consider the GPL too restrictive and replace any GPL code they can with BSD licensed versions.

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  • (Score: 2) by bryan on Wednesday September 12 2018, @06:27PM

    by bryan (29) <bryan@pipedot.org> on Wednesday September 12 2018, @06:27PM (#733771) Homepage Journal

    The BSD 3-Clause No Nuclear License [spdx.org] has caused this issue in the past. The offending line quoted here:

    You acknowledge that this software is not designed, licensed or intended for use in the design, construction, operation or maintenance of any nuclear facility.

    This license does not fit the Free Software [gnu.org] definition because it violates Freedom 0 (The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose.)
    This license does not fit the Open Source [opensource.org] definition because it violates criteria 6 (No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor.)
    However, this type of license is still referred to as "BSD" and thus causes all sorts of grief.